Banca de DEFESA: MATHEUS CALDAS TANAJURA

CARTOGRAPHIC INVESTIG.A(C)TIONS IN SALVADOR OLD CENTER OF: Rights violations and community commitments in current urban restructuring processes.

Cartographic activism; dispositive of raciality; racial violence; community
struggles; urban planning; Centro Antigo de Salvador.

This investig.a(c)tion discusses rights violations and community engagement in the
urban restructuring processes in the Centro Antigo de Salvador. By means an approach
that relates socio-spatial formation and asymmetrical power relations based on racism and
social discrimination, we seek to reflect how has been shaped a neoliberal type of urban
planning and management that keeps updating historical processes of vulnerabilization
of black and popular territories. Articulating the notions of dispositive of raciality
(CARNEIRO), compositional thinking (FERREIRA da SILVA) and cartographic activism
(SANTOS), we mapped the various actuations of public managers and private initiatives
around a corporate and notedly racist urban production, as also the social actions carried
out by communities and organized movements around struggles for permanence, for
popular housing, for infrastructure and for the guarantee of broad rights. For this, we
identified, within a time frame between 2010 and 2020, a heterogeneous set of laws, urban
ordering actions, architectural and urban interventions, discursive statements, violations
of rights, real estate launches and other institutional practices in the scope of planning
and management of the Centro Antigo. These actions are here understood as control
procedures that update a colonial and racial matrix of power. Concomitantly, we put in
relation the social actions of mobilization with, interventions in institutionalized spaces
of participation, public acts, notes, manifestos, internet posts and collective care actions
developed by a network of community collaborations that maintain and sustain the life
of these territories. In search of understanding the complex power games that constitute
these territories permeated by violence, orderings, resistance, cooperation, negotiations
and disputes, we methodologically use cartographic practice as a way of thinking-acting
in conflictive-collaborative situations. In addition to a visual tool for critical conceiving
and territorial analysis, we use multilingual cartographies as an instrument of social and
political action. From the perspective of a practical engagement, with an extensionist
bias, the cartographics investig.a(c)tions aim to contribute to the broadening of public
comprehension about the socio-spatial realities of the Centro Antigo and to collaborate
with the strategies of social struggles of communities and local movements. For this, we
bet on the construction of a collaborative virtual platform as a possibility for sharing and
accessing the database and the cartographies carried out in this graphic-dissertative work.